SERBRUCER,
When I officially moved to Hollywood in '78 (I had been down in Orange County doing my show with Maggie Raye previous to that), my apartment on Beachwood Drive had a view of the Hollywood Sign. They began tearing it down the day I moved in and I watched the new one go up.
As far as Hollywood memorabilia goes, the old barn that Cecil B. CeMille shot the first Hollywood movie in, The Squaw Man, was moved from the Paramount lot to a parking lot on
Argyle between Yucca & Hollywood Blvd. where it sat for a couple of years. and was close to my second apartment on Ivar (across from the Alto Nido where Nathaniel West wrote DAY OF THE LOCUSTS...I think about the courtyard bungalows I lived in). On one of my many jaunts past the place, I picked up a shingle that had fallen off the landmark...which I still have today.
The Barn now sits on Highland across from the Hollywood Bowl and, I believe, is a small museum about Hollywood's early days. I was in it only once when acquaintance Kathy Orrison had a book signing for her bio of Henry Wilcoxon, who I had got to know in his last years before his death. Actually one of Wilcoxon's old ash-trays for his pipe sits on my desk here in the office, which is full of change. I also have a set of smoked cordial glasses that were his and a few of his books.
